Duma Key: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “Fuck you, Edgar, for fucking up what was actually a pretty good day.”

  “I don’t care who you sleep with,” I said. “We’re divorced. All I want is to save Tom Riley’s life.”

  This time she screamed so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “I’m not RESPONSIBLE for his life! WE’RE QUITS! Did you miss that?” Then, a little lower (but not much): “He’s not even in St. Paul. He’s on a cruise with his mother and that gay-boy brother of his.”

  Suddenly I understood, or thought I did. It was as if I were flying over it, getting an aerial view. Maybe because I had contemplated suicide, cautioning myself all the while that it must absolutely look like an accident. Not so the insurance money would get paid, but so that my daughters wouldn’t have to go through life with the stigma of everyone knowing—

  And that was the answer, wasn’t it?

  “Tell him you know. When he gets back, tell him you know he’s planning to kill himself.”

  “Why would he believe me?”

  “Because he is planning to. Because you know him. Because he’s mentally ill, and probably thinks he’s going around with a sign that says PLANNING SUICIDE taped to his back. Tell him you know he’s been ditching his antidepressants. You do know that, right? For a fact.”

  “Yes. But telling him to take them never helped before.”

  “Did you ever tell him you’d tattle on him if he didn’t start taking his medicine? Tattle to everyone?”

  “No, and I’m not going to now!” She sounded appalled. “Do you think I want everyone in St. Paul to know I slept with Tom Riley? That I had a thing with him?”

  “How about all of St. Paul knowing you care what happens to him? Would that be so goddam awful?”

  She was silent.

  “All I want is for you to confront him when he comes back—”

  “All you want! Right! Your whole life has been about all you want! I tell you what, Eddie, if this is such a BFD to you, then you confront him!” It was that shrill hardness again, but this time with fear behind it.

  I said, “If you were the one who broke it off, you probably still have power over him. Including—maybe—the power to make him save his life. I know that’s scary, but you’re stuck with it.”

  “No I’m not. I’m hanging up.”

  “If he kills himself, I doubt if you’ll spend the rest of your life with a bad conscience … but I think you will have one miserable year. Or two.”

  “I won’t. I’ll sleep like a baby.”

  “Sorry, Panda, I don’t believe you.”

  It was an ancient pet name, one I hadn’t used in years, and I don’t know where it came from, but it broke her. She began to cry again. This time there was no anger in it. “Why do you have to be such a bastard? Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  I wanted no more of this. What I wanted was a couple of pain pills. And maybe to sprawl on my bed and have a good cry myself, I wasn’t sure. “Tell him you know. Tell him to see his psychiatrist and start taking his antidepressants again. And here’s the most important thing—tell him that if he kills himself, you’ll tell everyone, starting with his mother and brother. That no matter how good he makes it look, everyone will know it was really suicide.”

  “I can’t do that! I can’t!” She sounded hopeless.

  I considered this, and decided I’d put Tom Riley’s life entirely in her hands—simply pass it down the telephone wire to her. That sort of letting-go hadn’t been in the old Edgar Freemantle’s repertoire, but of course that Edgar Freemantle would never have considered spending his time painting sunsets. Or playing with dolls.

  “You decide, Panda. It might be useless anyway if he no longer cares for you, but—”

  “Oh, he does.” She sounded more hopeless than ever.

  “Then tell him he has to start living life again, like it or not.”

  “Good old Edgar, still managing things,” she said wanly. “Even from his island kingdom. Good old Edgar. Edgar the monster.”

  “That hurts,” I said.

  “Lovely,” she said, and hung up. I sat on the couch awhile longer, watching as the sunset grew brighter and the air in the Florida room grew colder. People who think there is no winter in Florida are very mistaken. An inch of snow fell in Sarasota in 1977. I guess it gets cold everywhere. I bet it even snows in hell, although I doubt if it sticks.

  ii

  Wireman called the next day shortly after noon and asked if he was still invited to look at my pictures. I felt some misgivings, remembering his promise (or threat) to give me his unvarnished opinion, but told him to come ahead.

  I set out what I thought were my sixteen best … although in the clear, cold daylight of that January afternoon they all looked pretty crappy to me. The sketch I’d made of Carson Jones was still on the shelf in my bedroom closet. I took it down, clipped it to a piece of fiberboard, and propped it at the end of the line. The penciled colors looked dowdy and plain compared to the oils, and of course it was smaller than the rest, but I still thought it had something the others lacked.

  I considered putting out the picture of the red-robe, then didn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe just because it gave me the creeps. I put out Hello—the pencil sketch of the tanker—instead.

  Wireman came buzzing up in a bright blue golf cart with sporty yellow pinstriping. He didn’t have to ring the bell. I was at the door to meet him.

  “You’ve got a certain drawn look about you, muchacho,” he said, coming in. “Relax. I ain’t the doctor and this ain’t the doctor’s office.”

  “I can’t help it. If this was a building and you were a building inspector, I wouldn’t feel this way, but—”

  “But that was your other life,” Wireman said. “This be your new one, where you haven’t got your walking shoes broke in yet.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “You’re damn right. Speaking of your prior existence, did you call your wife about that little matter you discussed with me?”

  “I did. Do you want the blow-by-blow?”

  “Nope. All I want to know is if you’re comfortable with the way the conversation turned out.”

  “I haven’t had a comfortable conversation with Pam since I woke up in the hospital. But I’m pretty sure she’ll talk to Tom.”

  “Then I guess that’ll do, pig. Babe, 1995.” He was all the way in now, and looking around curiously. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”

  I burst out laughing. I hadn’t even removed the no-smoking sign on top of the TV. “I had Jack put in a treadmill upstairs, that’s new. You’ve been here before, I take it?”

  He gave me an enigmatic little smile. “We’ve all been here before, amigo—this is bigger than pro football. Peter Straub, circa 1985.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “I’ve been working for Miss Eastlake about sixteen months now, with one brief and uncomfortable diversion to St. Pete when the Keys were evacuated for Hurricane Frank. Anyway, the last people to rent Salmon Point—pardon me, Big Pink—stayed just two weeks of their eight-week lease and then went boogie-bye-bye. Either they didn’t like the house or the house didn’t like them.” Wireman raised ghost-hands over his head and took big wavery ghost-steps across the light blue living room carpet. The effect was to a large degree spoiled by his shirt, which was covered with tropical birds and flowers. “After that, whatever walked in Big Pink … walked alone!”

  “Shirley Jackson,” I said. “Circa whenever.”

  “Yep. Anyway, Wireman was making a point, or trying to. Big Pink THEN!” He swept his arms out in an all-encompassing gesture. “Furnished in that popular Florida style known as Twenty-First Century Rent-A-House! Big Pink NOW! Furnished in Twenty-First Century Rent-A-House, plus Cybex treadmill upstairs, and …” He squinted. “Is that a Lucille Ball dolly I spy sitting on the couch in the Florida room?”

  “That’s Reba, the Anger-Management Queen. She was given to me by my psychologist friend, Kramer.” But th
at wasn’t right. My missing arm began to itch madly. For the ten thousandth time I tried to scratch it and got my still-mending ribs instead. “Wait,” I said, and looked at Reba, who was staring out at the Gulf. I can do this, I thought. It’s like where you put money when you want to hide it from the government.

  Wireman was waiting patiently.

  My arm itched. The one not there. The one that sometimes wanted to draw. It wanted to draw then. I thought it wanted to draw Wireman. Wireman and the bowl of fruit. Wireman and the gun.

  Stop the weird shit, I thought.

  I can do this, I thought.

  You hide money from the government in offshore banks, I thought. Nassau. The Bahamas. The Grand Caymans. And Bingo, there it was.

  “Kamen,” I said. “That’s his name. Kamen gave me Reba. Xander Kamen.”

  “Well now that we’ve got that solved,” Wireman said, “let’s look at the art.”

  “If that’s what it is,” I said, and led the way upstairs, limping on my crutch. Halfway up, something struck me and I stopped. “Wireman,” I said, without looking back, “how did you know my treadmill was a Cybex?”

  For a moment he said nothing. Then: “It’s the only brand I know. Now can you resume the upward ascent on your own, or do you need a kick in the ass to get going?”

  Sounds good, rings false, I thought as I started up the stairs again. I think you’re lying, and you know what? I think you know I know.

  iii

  My work was leaning against the north wall of Little Pink, with the afternoon sun giving the paintings plenty of natural light. Looking at them from behind Wireman as he walked slowly down the line, sometimes pausing and once even backtracking to study a couple of canvases a second time, I thought it was far more light than they deserved. Ilse and Jack had praised them, but one was my daughter and the other my hired man.

  When he reached the colored pencil drawing of the tanker at the very end of the line, Wireman squatted and stared at it for maybe thirty seconds with his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands hanging limply between his legs.

  “What—” I began.

  “Shhh,” he said, and I endured another thirty seconds of silence. At last he stood up. His knees popped. When he turned to face me, his eyes looked very large, and the left one was inflamed. Water—not a tear—was running from the inner corner. He pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and wiped it away, the automatic gesture of a man who does the same thing a dozen or more times a day.

  “Holy God,” he said, and walked toward the window, stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket.

  “Holy God what?” I asked. “Holy God what?”

  He stood looking out. “You don’t know how good these are, do you? I mean you really don’t.”

  “Are they?” I asked. I had never felt so unsure of myself. “Are you serious?”

  “Did you put them in chronological order?” he asked, still looking out at the Gulf. The joking, joshing, wisecracking Wireman had taken a hike. I had an idea the one I was listening to now had a lot more in common with the one juries had heard … always assuming he’d been that kind of lawyer. “You did, didn’t you? Other than the last couple, I mean. Those’re obviously much earlier.”

  I didn’t see how anything of mine could qualify as “much earlier” when I’d only been doing pictures for a couple of months, but when I ran my eye over them, I saw he was right. I hadn’t meant to put them in chronological order—not consciously—but that was what I had done.

  “Yes,” I said. “Earliest to most recent.”

  He indicated the last four paintings—the ones I’d come to think of as my sunset-composites. To one I’d added a nautilus shell, to one a compact disc with the word Memorex printed across it (and the sun shining redly through the hole), to the third a dead seagull I’d found on the beach, only blown up to pterodactyl size. The last was of the shell-bed beneath Big Pink, done from a digital photograph. To this I had for some reason felt the urge to add roses. There were none growing around Big Pink, but there were plenty of photos available from my new pal Google.

  “This last group of paintings,” he said. “Has anyone seen these? Your daughter?”

  “No. These four were done after she left.”

  “The guy who works for you?”

  “Nope.”

  “And of course you never showed your daughter the sketch you made of her boyfr—”

  “God, no! Are you kidding?”

  “No, of course you didn’t. That one has its own power, hasty as it obviously is. As for the rest of these things …” He laughed. I suddenly realized he was excited, and that was when I started to get excited. But cautious, too. Remember he used to be a lawyer, I told myself. He’s not an art critic.

  “The rest of these fucking things …” He gave that little yipping laugh again. He walked in a circle around the room, stepping onto the treadmill and over it with an unconscious ease that I envied bitterly. He put his hands in his graying hair and pulled it out and up, as if to stretch his brains.

  At last he came back. Stood in front of me. Confronted me, almost. “Look. The world has knocked you around a lot in the last year or so, and I know that takes a lot of gas out of the old self-image airbag. But don’t tell me you don’t at least feel how good they are.”

  I remembered the two of us recovering from our wild laughing fit while the sun shone through the torn umbrella, putting little scars of light on the table. Wireman had said I know what you’re going through and I had replied I seriously doubt that. I didn’t doubt it now. He knew. This memory of the day before was followed by a dry desire—not a hunger but an itch—to get Wireman down on paper. A combination portrait and still life, Lawyer with Fruit and Gun.

  He patted my cheek with one of his blunt-fingered hands. “Earth to Edgar. Come in, Edgar.”

  “Ah, roger, Houston,” I heard myself say. “You have Edgar.”

  “So what do you say, muchacho? Am I lyin or am I dyin? Did you or did you not feel they were good when you were doing them?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I felt like I was kicking ass and taking down names.”

  He nodded. “It’s the simplest fact of art—good art almost always feels good to the artist. And the viewer, the committed viewer, the one who’s really looking—”

  “I guess that’d be you,” I said. “You took long enough.”

  He didn’t smile. “When it’s good and the person who’s looking opens up to it, there’s an emotional bang. I felt the bang, Edgar.”

  “Good.”

  “You bet it is. And when that guy at the Scoto gets a load of these, I think he’ll feel it, too. In fact, I’d bet on it.”

  “They’re really not so much. Reheated Dalí, when you get right down to it.”

  He put an arm around my shoulders and led me toward the stairs. “I’m not going to dignify that. Nor are we going to discuss the fact that you apparently painted your daughter’s boyfriend via some weird phantom-limb telepathy. I do wish I could see that tennis-ball picture, but what’s gone is gone.”

  “Good riddance, too,” I said.

  “But you have to be very careful, Edgar. Duma Key is a powerful place for … certain kinds of people. It magnifies certain kinds of people. People like you.”

  “And you?” I asked. He didn’t answer immediately, so I pointed at his face. “That eye of yours is watering again.”

  He took out the handkerchief and wiped it.

  “Want to tell me what happened to you?” I asked. “Why you can’t read? Why it weirds you out to even look at pictures too long?”

  For a long time he said nothing. The shells under Big Pink had a lot to say. With one wave they said the fruit. With the next they said the gun. Back and forth like that. The fruit, the gun, the gun, the fruit.

  “No,” he said. “Not now. And if you want to draw me, sure. Knock yourself out.”

  “How much of my mind can you read, Wireman?”

  “Not much,” he
said. “You caught a break there, muchacho.”

  “Could you still read it if we were off Duma Key? If we were in a Tampa coffee shop, for instance?”

  “Oh, I might get a tickle.” He smiled. “Especially after spending over a year here, soaking up the … you know, the rays.”

  “Will you go to the gallery with me? The Scoto?”

  “Amigo, I wouldn’t miss it for all the tea in China.”

  iv

  That night a squall blew in off the water and it rained hard for two hours. Lightning flashed and waves pounded the pilings under the house. Big Pink groaned but stood firm. I discovered an interesting thing: when the Gulf got a little crazy and those waves really poured in, the shells shut up. The waves lifted them too high for conversation.

  I went upstairs at the boom-and-flash height of the festivities, and—feeling a little like Dr. Frankenstein animating his monster in the castle tower—drew Wireman, using a plain old Venus Black pencil. Until the very end, that was. Then I used red and orange for the fruit in the bowl. In the background I sketched a doorway, and in the doorway I put Reba, standing there and watching. I supposed Kamen would have said Reba was my representative in the world of the picture. Maybe sí, maybe no. The last thing I did was pick up the Venus Sky to color in her stupid eyes. Then it was done. Another Freemantle masterpiece is born.

  I sat looking at it while the diminishing thunder rolled away and the lightning flashed a few goodbye stutters over the Gulf. There was Wireman, sitting at a table. Sitting there, I had no doubt, at the end of his other life. On the table was a bowl of fruit and the pistol he kept either for target practice (back then his eyes had been fine) or for home protection or both. I had sketched the pistol and then scribbled it in, giving it a sinister, slightly blobby look. That other house was empty. Somewhere in that other house a clock was ticking. Somewhere in that other house a refrigerator was whining. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers. The scent was terrible. The sounds were worse. The march of the clock. The relentless whine of the refrigerator as it went on making ice in a wifeless, childless world. Soon the man at the table would close his eyes, stretch out his hand, and pick a piece of fruit from the bowl. If it was an orange, he’d go to bed. If it was an apple, he would apply the muzzle of the gun to his right temple, pull the trigger, and air out his aching brains.